Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
XV.V.XV

HOW TO PLANT TREES FOR
DEVELOPMENT

By Sunita
Narain

Today, in
India, forest protection happens against all odds.
There is no economic value seen in forests, but
there is value seen in the development project for
which forestland is required. Clearly, this is not
the way to go. We need a value to be paid for
standing forests; it needs to be shared with
people who inhabit these lands; we need to grow
trees in ways which bring money to the poor; and
we need to learn how to protect, regenerate and
grow trees, all at the same time.

The last time India
seriously tried planting trees was in the late
1980s. The then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had
declared that he wanted to make tree plantation a
peoples’ movement. The Wasteland Development
Board was set up and social forestry was the
buzzword. But soon it was realised that planting
trees was more than just digging pits—it was
about institutional mechanisms that would give
people rights over trees and a stake in
management. It was at this time that Anil Agarwal
and I co-authored a report on greening India
called Towards Green Villages. In this we showed
how every effort to plant trees would be defeated
unless people got benefits from these forestlands.
It is important to understand that India has the
highest density of livestock and no wall can keep
out people’s goats.

imageAll this built an
understanding of the need to involve people in
afforestation. We argued that village communities
should be given rights over government forestland
so that they could plant trees and reap benefits.
There was huge opposition to this idea. Many
foresters and conservationists feared that this
would destroy forests; people would take over
these lands or fail to manage the business of
planting trees.

A compromise was worked
out: a scheme called Joint Forest Management.
Under this trees would be planted on forestland;
people would plant and protect the forest and
voluntarily keep their animals out. In return they
would get usufruct rights over grass and a share
of the timber revenue. The forest department kept
control through village committees formed under
the scheme.

There were many problems
with this approach but the final insult came when
the trees were ready for harvest. In villages
where people provided years of free labour to
guard and grow trees, the payment turned out to be
minuscule. Why? The forest department adopted a
highly deceptive and ingenious method of
calculating the revenue that would accrue to the
people. It deducted all the expenses of the
department and then calculated the net revenue.
The 20-25 per cent of the sale proceeds promised
to people turned out to be a pittance. In this way
people lost trust, the country lost the
opportunity to get a real partnership in planting
trees.

As a result, the country
has swung from one extreme position to another,
from the pre-1980s, when the focus was on
extraction, to now, the post-2010 period, when we
do not want to cut any tree because we fear it
will destroy forests. This fear drives forest
policy, which denies people rights to ownership or
real partnership in growing trees and building
local economies. We now import our wood. Forest
productivity is nobody’s
business.

Currently, the Supreme
Court’s strict directives on forest
conservation, not management, guide forest policy.
There is a ban on cutting trees in forest areas
without a working plan; the plans are either not
made or do not focus on production. Then there is
a ban on saw mills around forest areas which
provides an excuse for not building economies out
of forests. The ultimate protection is that all
tracts of land with trees get classified as
forests. This allows the forest department to take
over these areas, even if it cannot take care of
the land under its charge.

What really hurts is
planting a tree is now bound up in so much red
tape that it is not worth the effort. Every state
has its own rules to cut, transport or market
trees—even if grown on private
land—because of which people prefer not to
grow trees at all.

We have ended up
successfully disconnecting environmental
management with development. Today, the poorest
people of India live in its richest forested
areas. We need to move beyond conservation to
sustainable management of this resource. But we
can do this only if we can grow trees, cut them
and then plant them again. This, in turn, requires
partnerships with people. This is what we need to
discuss and work on. Environment must become
India’s development agenda again. This is
imperative.